Page images
PDF
EPUB

"Unless you want your aunt to know that your intention is to become my wife —————” he began.

[ocr errors]

But I interrupted by vehemently crying,

"I would not have my aunt know for the brightest future of love you could offer me. When it is a fait accompli it will be time enough for her to hear. Then I shall not have to face her."

"Precisely.

Wherefore I command that you hold yourself in readiness to accompany me to-morrow by the early train to London. Are you terrified at this proposition ?"

"No. I am resolute. It is the only course to adopt."

"Good. We shall give you a warrior's soul yet, instead of a little red mouse.'

[ocr errors]

"How about the baby and the nurse ?"

"We will be married first, then post to Newtown. All this will occupy half a dozen hours. Then I will write to the nurse, tell her to bring the child to me, enclosè her fare, meet her, and bring her home. See how difficulties vanish when you mean a thing!"

"What will my aunt say!" I exclaimed involuntarily. "How ungrateful she will think me! What a wretch she will call me, to abandon her in her solitude after her recent kindness!"

"Now," he exclaimed, "we are going to be treated to a touch of what I call the sentimentalism of irony."

"There may be some sentimentalism, but there is no irony in what I have said," I answered.

"You are not in earnest in professing any regrets at the thoughts your conduct may give rise to in your aunt?"

"I would not have cared a year or two ago, but latterly she has been treating me with kindness."

CHAPTER XII.

I ASSUME in beginning this chapter the privilege of the playwright, who having dropped his curtain suffers it to rise again on a new act and a

new ne.

home at Newtown. A low long-built house, indows close fitting, small, and numerously

glass, after an old but cosy fashion of ' stands in very tolerably-sized grounds, well turnpike road outside the surrounding murderously anointed with broken ak, well studded with black-headed 3. As you enter the wide but low sombre pictures, a large window of complicated radiance. It confronts and illustrates' Christ's Charge to

Peter.' The subject does not seem out of keeping. Even a fastidious taste might recognise its harmony with the slippery highly-polished oaken staircase, the termination of the hall in the form of a gothic archway, the prevailing gloom, which receives but little light from the thick, stained glass. On the left is the drawing-room, massively furnished the dark cabinets, the sombre pictures, the deep green carpet, the heavy curtains, the quaintly carved chairs and medievally designed sofas and settees, finding but small relief in the gleam of silver from tall candelabras and broad inkstands. To the right is the parlour fitted up even more sombrely than the drawing-room: for a kind of solemnity is suggested by the high bookcase laden with works old enough, curious enough, and unreadable enough to have ravished the heart of a Southey, a Lamb, or a Johnson. Upstairs there is more airiness. Still the old four-posters with which the upper part of the house abounds lose nothing of their funereal aspect by the snow-white quilts, the sumptuous toilet-tables, and the more modern furniture which make the bedsteads resemble a very old building—a church or an abbey in the centre of a very new town.

Chester House is Major Rivers' residence. This is the house he had furnished for the reception of himself and Kate. His love of the sombre, illustrated by his choice of furniture and pictures, might have remained unsuspected in the prevailing tone-half satirical, half earnest, but light withal-of his conversation.

On the day of my marriage we drove to Chester House, and the same post that bore a letter to the nurse from the Major, bidding her return with the baby to him, conveyed a long epistle from me to my aunt, begging her forgiveness, pleading my love, and assuring her of my grateful memory. To this letter I received no answer. I awaited the arrival of the nurse with curiosity, being anxious to know how my aunt received the news of my elopement-for such it was. The little Frenchwoman herself manifested no surprise whatever at the event. She treated it with a perfectly Parisian indifference, accepting me as her mistress unhesitatingly, and settling down to her duties with the obedience and respect towards myself which, had I been her mistress before, I might have understood.

"Were you not astonished to hear of my marriage with Major Rivers?" I asked.

"Du tout, Madame. Where there is love there is nothing but unexpectedness. Il n'y a point d'indiscrétion. He would be an imbecile who should expect anything more from love than surprise. And as I knew there was love, and as I was prepared for surprise". and she made a peroration with her shoulders.

"Et ma tante, Celestine?"

"Madame, when you did not come to dinner she seemed to have made up her mind that there was something wrong. The afternoon

She

and the evening passed, but she never mentioned your name. went to bed at her usual hour, had the house bolted, and to my question. about you as she passed the nursery on her way to her room merely responded, 'She has gone, I suppose, to find her level. She would have found it long enough ago but for Lorton.' I happened to be in the room when the postman came with the two letters. I read mine and then looked at Madame your aunt, who was reading one which I suspected was from you. She wore her spectacles, read the letter through to the very end-it was a crossed letter, madame, was it not ?"-I nodded"and then she folded it up, tore it with an unmoved countenance into ever so many little pieces, and flung them into the fire. After which she composedly removed her spectacles, and, without a tremor in her voice, said: 'I suppose they want you back?' 'Yes, madame.' 'Then,' said she, 'the sooner you go the better. I am breathing a very foul air, and shall be suffocated if I do not clear my house of every taint of it.'"

[ocr errors]

I felt relieved by this story. My heart swelled with indignation, and my old dislike for my aunt renewed itself with all its bitterness. Had she wept, had she but expressed one word of sorrow, I should have felt pained and found a keen reproach in her regret at my departure. But her language, her unconcern, of which I knew the savagery so well, left us quits.

For the first six months of my married life my days were a perpetual honeymoon. Major Rivers was all tenderness, all passion. He showered gifts upon me; treated me like an empress, acted towards me like a slave. He seemed to find an inexhaustible pleasure in my society: provoked me by his loving badinage into my most characteristic moods, to win from me remarks of which he declared the quaintness to be soothing to him as the notes of a dulcimer. I gloried in his praise, and the reciprocal passion urged me into never wearying efforts to sustain his love at the mark where I had found it. As a horsewoman I succeeded after some trials in acquitting myself capitally, and became his constant companion in long excursions into the adjoining country. Our proximity to London was convenient for the entertainments of the capital, and we frequently visited the operas and the theatres. But it was as his fireside companion that he seemed to find most pleasure in my company. I read to him, played to him, opened my heart to him in conversation with a childish earnestness of meaning which delighted him. I found him well read in books: a fair linguist and furtively studied that I might be able to help on the long talks he loved to indulge in on those curiosities of literature which the pencil-marked pages in his library showed he had studied. I was a splendid listener; and this useful accomplishment was made profitable by my having a mind sufficiently well stored to comprehend very well all that he could talk about.

Those natural fears which I had felt at first in consequence of the insecurity of my position as a wife were dispelled. As my intimacy with his character increased I lost the suspicions which the least fancied coolness towards me inspired. In my young days I had sometimes regretted my want of beauty, imagining that my plainness would banish me beyond the circle of love; and envied Kate for her eyes, her beautiful hair, her lovely mouth, and her dainty complexion. I had contrasted my own appearance with the exquisite beauties of the ladies in the novels over which I pored; and although here and there I had come across a plain heroine who had been rewarded after three volumes of misery by a happy marriage, I felt that the exceptional instances of fiction were in no wise applicable to life, and that I might prepare myself for a career of dull unchequered maidenhood. Now, however, that I was the wife of the man I loved, I over and over again congratulated myself on my want of beauty; for I knew that a much more durable quality than good looks had brought me a husband, and that it was the mind and not the face upon which the maintenance of his love depended.

Major Rivers had a fine voice-a rich baritone-but he could not play. Many an evening, when the twilight filled the room with a cool mysterious light, he would make me seat myself at the piano, and with his left hand reposing on the back of my neck accompany with his voice the melodies which I would play, knowing how he loved them. In the faint light, as he sang with his gleaming eyes fixed upon the deep sky melting into stars, his face took a severity of beauty. He abandoned himself to the music and the poetry of the song he sung, and I seemed to feel his hand tremble in sympathetic unison with the impassioned accents of his rich deep chant. At such moments I appeared to lose my personality; my soul abandoned me, to mingle and sing with his. I realised the intense mysticism of the German fancy that between two souls the union is sometimes so complete that the identity of the weaker soul is lost in its absorption by the stronger.

There was one trouble that haunted and depressed me, however, in this period of my life, which you may easily guess. It was the social position I occupied at Newtown. I was certain that Major Rivers knew several families at Newtown, though he rarely mentioned their names. But, with the exception of one presently to be mentioned, nobody ever called at Chester House. At times, when I had been out riding with the Major, I would observe him sometimes lift his hat to a passing carriage, but to my question "Who was that?" the invariable answer was "Oh, the wife of a city man, not worth twopence to know," or "A family I have met, heaven knows where." Now, altogether unsophisticated as I was-as my bucolic life at Lorton had left me-I had never seriously thought upon, for I had never positively guessed, the sort of treatment I must be prepared to meet from society after

my marriage with Major Rivers. I knew that by marrying my sister's husband I was violating the law; but I did not know that I should be offending society. I had to learn that.

The discovery wounded me to the quick. It did not make me regret my marriage, but it made me despise my judgment for not having foreseen the situation.

But if my humiliated pride filled me with bitterness I was also terrified and dejected by the fear that this banning of myself by society might come to influence my husband's sentiments towards me. I had enough sagacity to guess how vastly married life was controlled by society; how generally the violation of decorum by a woman was recriminated upon her by the man for whom she had sacrificed her name and purity. An early passion may wilfully ignore restraint; but a matured love will in the end take its tone from decorum.

Studiously as I laboured to conceal my discovery from the Major his keen eye detected my depression, and his sagacity divined the cause. After I had been playing to him one evening, I left the piano and walked towards the window full of meditation. He came and stood beside me.

"What is there in this prospect," he said, pointing towards the garden, "which makes my little one so sad ?"

"I am not sad."

"Yes you are. A troublesome thought has crept into your mind. Tell me this mental disease that I may minister to it."

"It is nothing indeed," I said, eager to avert a painful discussion. "Nonsense. There is always a cause for a dimmed eye and a pale cheek. But she's going to be stubborn, like she was when I wanted her to marry me."

He bent his head in the attitude of listening. But I did not speak.

"Maggie, you are a little fool to allow the opinions of others to distress you. If you are satisfied with yourself it is enough."

"I see you have guessed the secret of my depression. I might indignantly repudiate your suspicion. But I will be wise and confess that you are right."

"That's brave. I love your candour. You don't like being avoided by society. You think it desperately hard, as a wife, a lady, and a clever girl, you should be shunned by a set of people who have not virtue enough to comprehend your impropriety.

"Do not think to gratify me by abusing them," I exclaimed. "I do not wish you to think that I lay so much stress upon these neighbours' conduct as to make them worthy of my sneers or my anger." "Come. You are dissatisfied with them and your dissatisfaction would vent itself in no end of satire if it were not suppressed by the might of your pride. But your feelings towards them are wholly and

« PreviousContinue »